


Permanent and Unchanging

by orphan_account



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Dark, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-18
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-01 23:58:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a pity that Edea didn't have any biological kids, because she would have made a bang-up mom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Permanent and Unchanging

Edea watches the girl. The celebrations are over, the SeeD have triumphed, and she is finally at peace. She can leave Garden, if she likes; at last, she can fulfill the marital vows she made to Cid. 

To have and to hold, she thinks, for better or for worse.

Finally there can be a better, a change, an evolution. Cid is portly and crinkled at the edges of his mouth, laugh lines overlapping with frown lines. He is scarred and stretchy in places; he’s grown and expanded far beyond the boy she first loved, into a flabby, imperfect man. When she finds a single blemish on her chin, she smiles, glad that she can finally catch up. 

She and Cid plan to make a home. They plan to grow old together. He laughs and leaves to rebuild the orphanage, and promises to fill it with wayward children. 

Yes, Cid says, and also, of course I remember that one, and he needs a home, and I will have him waiting when you arrive.

“Thank you,” Edea says. She promises to follow, soon. 

But she cannot leave just yet. Her powers are gone; she’s free, as though she’s shed her own skin. It was the most perfect, confining skin, but now it’s gone. There’s no reason, she tells herself, to make it more than that. 

There’s no reason the girl should be affected as she was.

Edea stays and watches, just in case. Others might watch for a transformation, to see the sorceress’s eyes glaze over golden, or to find strange patterns on her skin, whorls of power. Edea knows better. Rinoa Heartilly has friends, has purpose, has a lover. She will not yet oppose humanity; she isn’t isolated enough. She’s still too much a part of the world to turn against it.

There isn’t a ripple of change in her. The weeks pass, and the new sorceress takes to Garden with barely a tremor. She’s still so kind, and slightly naïve, and she never betrays a hint of disloyalty, of what the old stories term ‘Hyne’s lurking strangeness.’ She seems, to everyone but Edea, so perfectly, wonderfully normal. 

Edea was a sorceress for a very long time, and only for a fraction of that time was she anything but normal. She received her powers when she was younger than Rinoa, and she watched the world become putty in her hands: stone and wood and the finest adamantine could be twisted and manipulated like silk, and human minds were like bright new toys one could shatter into star fragments. It was wonderful for a moment, and then her terror overtook her, and she realized how worthless, how ephemeral everything was. 

Finding a knight helped. The utter devotion he gave her was perfection: she could bend crystal and warp the boundaries of thought, but she couldn’t turn him away. He was her one perfect constant.

I’ll do whatever you need, he told her. If anyone stands against you, he said, I’ll be there to defend you. 

In all the universe, only his mind was as slavish and unchanging as she was. For some time, that was enough. She could latch on to him, and she could be normal. He accepted her, just once, and Edea poured herself into him without warning. Through her magic, Cid’s boyish devotion was lengthened, prolonged far past the normal bounds of human loyalty. 

Few, Edea thinks, could possibly understand that reward. He accepted her fright, the horrifying reality of her existence – a world where nothing couldn’t be destroyed – and she gave him something indestructible. Their bond. 

And it worked for as long as Cid, aging and imperfect, was equal to her magic. When she took on the powers of the dying sorceress, the world once again shifted. Her knight’s mind was so small, all of a sudden. He was sometimes so far away, and he would return to her each time like a new person, and she was still so fixed by comparison. She could skip stones on the bloody surface of the moon, if she liked, or sink entire continents beneath the ocean. She was so powerful and impermeable – Cid’s flaky, unpredictable existence was no longer enough. 

Even in such a state, Edea staved off the inevitable for some time. Years passed after she gained a second set of powers, and she didn’t age, and the world didn’t change; it was as feeble and pathetic as it had ever been. And she was so strong by comparison. Her youth and powers were eternal, and it was sickening, being forced to see just how weak everything was. 

When she felt a prickle, a delicious slice of powers equal to her own, a voice saying, I know how awful it kan be, so kome, and let’s change it ourselves, she went. What else could she do? 

The danger, Edea thinks, isn’t in the transformations, in the unnatural eyes and aberrant markings. The danger comes before all that, through seeing how foul and minor and variable the world can be. It comes when the sorceress knows herself to be unchanging and perfect, and realizes that nothing else can ever be enough. 

Edea had enough power, enough perfection for two sorceresses. Rinoa Heartilly has enough for three. If her knight is equal to it, if he promises to be stalwart, if his aging and his changing and his imperfections never belie his devotion, then Rinoa may never falter. And even Edea can see that she chose Squall well, that he is capable of a great deal of devotion. 

But Rinoa has a great deal of power, and Squall is already changing. He is so much more open than before, new layers of his self unfurling with every discovery: a sister, a father, friendships, responsibilities. He is sometimes in Esthar, helping the city recover from the Lunar Cry, and sometimes in Trabia, rebuilding the ruined Garden. Rinoa Heartilly, once so devoted to re-establishing Timber, to making the world a better place, never goes with him. 

She stays in Garden, where she is kind and dutiful and patient and perfect. It’s so loyal of her, everyone thinks, to wait for him. She isn’t domineering or selfish; she’s nothing like a sorceress, really. 

Selfishness, Edea knows, is beside the point. Why should Rinoa help rebuild the world now that she knows the truth? How can she waste her energy on peace talks, or on foreign aid, when she sees how easily she can sink the universe with a whisper? And that is something she very well might do, eventually. For now, Rinoa may be scared of herself. She may have too much to lose, too many friends and loved ones to risk. In time, her boredom and stagnation will make those bonds irrelevant. She will want a change, and she will do anything to get it.

Unless.

“Talk to me,” Edea tells her. “You’ll tell me if Squall isn’t doing enough for you, dear.” She smiles and holds Rinoa’s perfect, delicate hand. “Won’t you?”

And Rinoa stammers like a little girl, like one of Edea’s own children, and says that no, of course Squall is perfect, only sometimes…

“It can be so awful to have him far away,” Edea says. “It’s like he doesn’t even know how much you need him. You really need him to love you, don’t you?”

Squall does love me, she insists over and over, and he adores me, and he is devoted to me. 

“Oh,” Edea says, “Is that really enough?”

Rinoa looks shocked, but Edea sees a glimmer of understanding there, just before the sorceress shakes her head and says don’t be silly, of course that’s enough, and isn’t it always?

Edea laughs and wags a finger at her, and says, very firmly, “No.”

And when Rinoa’s mouth drops open, an ‘O’, like the face everyone normal makes when they are surprised, Edea rolls her eyes. 

“There needs to be a balance, dear,” Edea says. “You need someone to latch onto, someone equal to you, someone to hold all that frustrated power. Tell me, is Squall a large enough vessel? You are very powerful, you know. ”

There are tears for a few minutes, but they are just the tears that a normal girl of seventeen or eighteen would cry and the sorceress isn’t really upset—it’s just that she will be a teenage girl forever and it really is terribly impossible for her to be anything else. Edea understands. 

“If he isn’t,” Edea says conversationally, “It will ruin you, you know. You cannot exist without a proper knight. You’ll give in.”

Rinoa shakes her head again. 

“No, my dear,” Edea says, “You really will. You’ll become a monster. A sorceress is nothing without a proper knight or two.”

Or two, Rinoa echoes. What do you mean two, she says, and also, you can’t possibly be suggesting…

“I have someone for you,” Edea says, and she invites Rinoa to the orphanage. “He is very suited to it. You don’t have to worry anymore.”

When the other sorceress had overpowered her, latched onto her mind, all Edea could think about was how unnatural and backwards and reversed it was. She was a sorceress herself, and wasn’t meant to be controlled; she couldn’t possibly hold onto all of Ultimecia’s anger and fear and power. Edea had been able to lock away parts of her mind, to keep Ultimecia from seeing her secrets: SeeD, Ellone. Edea wasn’t meant to be used as a vessel. 

Ultimecia, too, seemed aware of that. Edea alone could not serve; she needed a knight. 

When she found one, even Edea had been impressed. He was so young and confused. His mind, his insecurities, every little empty part of him that needed to be filled: these things were all boundless. He was frustrated and pathetic and childish and perfect. 

Ultimecia pierced his mind, said kome with me to a place of no return; bid farewell to your childhood, and he, like Edea, faltered. 

Poor thing. Edea cannot imagine what it must be like now, to be so empty after holding all of the sorceress’s fear, all of her power. What would happen, she wonders, if she dispatched Cid? She is no longer a sorceress, so she would survive, but Cid will always be her knight. Her magic has molded him for all these years; he has been forced to change enough for the both of them. He would be nothing without their bond, she thinks. He’s become his own devotion. Edea will never make him live without it. Not like poor Seifer.

Seifer sits in handcuffs and he says, when are you gonna take me to Garden, then? And the two SeeDs on either side of him look to Cid, who dismisses them. 

Rinoa, because she will always be seventeen and a little naïve, wrinkles her nose at his stubble and the unwashed smell of him and refuses to say anything.

Cid looks to his wife and says, well, here he is, our wayward child, and, I brought him just like I promised. 

Edea smiles and says, “See? Don’t turn your nose up, dear. He needs you as much as you need him. He already accepted Ultimecia’s power once. He’s as good as yours.”

Seifer tries to move away, and Edea feels for her child, because he must be so confused and in so much pain with the loss of his sorceress. He says silly things like, no, I don’t want another one in my head, and, leave me alone, please, I’ll disappear if you want me to. 

That last one is especially silly, because of course he will. He is back to his old ways, stupid and isolated and pathetic, and Rinoa is going to help him. She’s going to erase all that. She’ll fill him up with her power and make him so much better: eternally and unchangingly devoted, so that he can’t live without her. 

Rinoa walks up to him, and Edea looks at her fondly because, in spite of seeing how weak and insecure he is, Rinoa is still willing to help him. Where Ultimecia, evil and twisted, was ready to lie, Rinoa tells the truth. 

She tells him, don’t worry, Seifer, it’s the same old me, and I haven’t changed at all. 

Then she takes his mind. 

\--

Later, Edea sits on the beach with her knight and she is satisfied. Everyone thinks sorceresses are dangerous, but that’s only a convenient half-truth. Sorceresses unbound, their power unfurling dangerously across a weak, immaterial world, yes. There is only so long one can stand being riveted to perfection, being responsible for all of the permanence and eternity in a feeble, vulnerable universe. 

Cid strokes her hair. Inside, Seifer is active and responsible. He hammers and tears up boards. He’d apologized so beautifully to Rinoa and said I know I can make it up to you if you give me a chance, just let me do this for you, I can be a better man and I have to do this for you ‘cause I’ll be in love with you forever. I can’t exist without you. 

Rinoa said I know and then she’d left. Edea knows that she’ll be back. Seifer holds so much of her now, so much power and pain, and fear and desire. He channels it into devotion. 

Edea was fifteen when she gained her first set of powers. She’s spent decades without aging, watching Cid transform into a wonderful man under her influence, a man who is nothing without her. Still, she doesn’t need her knight anymore. She remembers being powerful and perfect, how nothing mattered but her own wishes. She could abandon him, if she were cruel, and she knows all too well how to be cruel, how to make the entire world suffer on her say-so. But Edea would never do that. She was once a normal girl: a kind, conscientious person. She knows she still is. Magic hasn’t changed her at all.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ages ago and can't decide if I like it? It's not really how I see Edea or Rinoa. It's just a brief foray into idficcy darkness, I guess.


End file.
